www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/04/21/academic.hoax.ap/index.html
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Three MIT graduate students set out to show what kind of gobbledygook can pass muster at an academic conference the se days, writing a computer program that generates fake, nonsensical pap ers. The program, developed by students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Ag uayo, generated a paper with the dumbfounding title: "Rooter: A Methodol ogy for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." Its in troduction begins: "Many scholars would agree that, had it not been for active networks, the simulation of Lamport clocks might never have occur red." The program works like the old "Mad Libs" books, generating sentences tak en from real papers but leaving many words blank. It fills the blanks wi th random buzzwords common in computer science. And it adds to the veris imilitude with meaningless charts and graphs. Earlier this month, the students received word that the Ninth World Multi -Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, scheduled to take place in July in Orlando, Florida, had accepted the four-page "Rooter" paper. A second bogus submission -- "The Influence of Probabilistic Meth odologies on Networking" -- was rejected. The offer accepting a paper and inviting the students to present it in pe rson in Orlando was rescinded after word of the hoax got out, and the st udents were refunded the $390 fee to attend the conference and have the paper published in its proceedings. But they still hope to go, using the more than $2,000 raised in contribut ions to their prank, much of it from admirers who tested the program on the students' Web site. "We wanted to go down there and give a randomly generated talk," Striblin g said. E-mails to a conference address and to organizer Nagib Callaos were not i mmediately returned Wednesday, and there was no answer at the Orlando te lephone number listed under Callaos' name. According to e-mails sent to the students and information posted by Calla os on the conference Web site, reviewers detected several bogus submissi ons. But the reviewers provided no "formal feedback" on the second paper , so it was accepted as a "non-reviewed paper." Callaos said it would ha ve been unfair to reject a paper because there had been no feedback. Stribling doubts the paper fooled anyone who actually read it, which keep s the hoax a notch below a famous 1996 prank in which physicist Alan Sok al persuaded a Duke University journal called Social Text to publish a b ogus article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformat ive Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." But in addition to mocking academic jargon, the prank sheds light on what Stribling sees as a problem: conferences with low standards that pander to academics looking to pad their resumes, but which harm the reputatio ns of more reputable gatherings. "We certainly exposed this conference as being willing to publish any pap er regardless of whether it's been peer-reviewed, which is kind of a dan gerous precedent to set," Stribling said. "It's kind of dangerous to be able to pass anything off as scientifically valid." According to its Web site, the conference featured more than 2,900 papers last year, and a preliminary program for this year's event lists presen tations by researchers from numerous universities, including highly resp ected ones like Northwestern and the University of Texas, as well as com panies such as Intel Corp. But the conference has apparently been targeted by pranksters before. An Australian computer scientist, Justin Zobel, describes on his Web site three papers that were accepted without comment for the 2002 conference . One submission was purposefully nonsensical, another submission juxtapose d lines from two different papers, and the third tried unsuccessfully to sabotage itself by claiming, for instance, that the method proposed "do es not work at all."
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